News - The Sasha Laxton gender debate (30 January 2012)

We meet Keiran Cooper and Beck Laxton, the parents of five-year-old Sasha Laxton who is being brought up as neither a boy nor a girl.

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  News & Politics

[Matthew Jarvis]

I see who wears the trousers in this relationship ha

[ISmarterThanYou]

Language by necessity has to be able to express differences - difference is not the issue. Language that readily furthers misconceptions about what differences are innately tied to the actual innate differences is the problem. To use your example, ageism is not eliminated by ignoring the physical reality of age and aging - it is eliminated by routinely pointing out that the vast majority of traits people associate with age are not inherently truly linked to age.

[ISmarterThanYou]

I pity your inability to even conceive of the possibility that they would actually want what they are saying. They also don't really exude mannerisms of superiority or arrogance in this video, so either you've seen/read something I missed, or more likely, projecting your own biases about people like them onto your perception of them.

[ISmarterThanYou]

I think that's somewhat of an English-speaker (perhaps American specifically) perception - that Sasha is feminine. Sasha is, in many countries, a gender neutral name - in Russian, for example, "Sasha" is equivalent to "Alex" - both are the short version of "Alexander/Alexandra", in Russian and English respectively.

[elgado]

Ideally, parents should take up the struggle against stereotyping one step further by raising their children without language. Language, as such, constructs difference; it makes discrimination possible.

Similarly, a child should also be raised without a concept of age, so as to remove the conditions of possibility for ageism. It is so silly that we live in a society were so-called 20-year-olds can, merely by virtue of drawing from society's arbirtrary standards, call 60-year-olds "old."

[F Malik]

well i see Sasha as a more feminism name so it's only my opinion but you could have gone for something more guy like? something like ben or bob you know names like that... I understand what you are getting at and it is good but dressing him like a girl will so get him bullied and I think a lot of people will be judgmental. it's a bit ott and more experimental like :/

[Beck Laxton]

It's not. Duh!

[F Malik]

why give him a girls name then?? :/

[captainboing]

freaks. Clear she wanted a daughter and now she is wrecking her son. My god look at the pair of them, so superior and arrogant.